Re: installation rant (ignore if in bad mood)

[Daniel Fetchinson <fetchinson googlemail com>]

On 12/7/09, Daniel Fetchinson <fetchinson googlemail com> wrote:
> <rant on>
>
> Folks, this will be another rant about general user experience.
>
> I consider myself computer literate so compiling from source is never
> a problem as long as ./configure; make; make install works. If not, I
> consider the software crappy. I tried installing the latest sawfish
> bundle, in this order:
>
> librep 0.90.3
> rep-gtk 0.90.0
> sawfish 1.5.3
>
> First I wanted to install to a custom location using --prefix but that
> didn't work, see the other recent thread I started. So I thought,
> okay, let's not give sawfish developers a hard time, let's just
> install to the default locations. So I did
>
> ./configure
> make
> make install
>
> on librep. All good. Then to rep-gtk: ./configure fails with
>
> checking for LIBREP... no
> configure: error: can not locate librep
>
> What?? Even if everything is installed to the default location
> configure can't find it. Why?
>
> Guys, I really love sawfish, but recently the quality of released code
> really is going down. If I can't install something with configure,
> make, make install, in even the *simplest* possible circumstances,
> then there is something wrong.
>
> </rant off>
>
> Cheers,
> Daniel


<rant on>

And yes, exporting PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig does help.
But I'd say instead of adding all sorts of features and moving things
around in the code right now the priority should be a rock solid
release, even if this involves a feature freeze for a considerable
amount of time. The current release really needs some attention, see
the tons of complaints about compilation and installation issues.

And yes, I know sawfish is maintained by volunteers and I should be
thankful instead of ranting if I'm not contributing code, but still,
sometimes one needs to let out the steam :)

Cheers,
Daniel

</rant off>

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